OBIEE, OBI Apps, ODI, Informatica, Essbase, BI Publisher...you name it. The OBI suite entails them all and more.
I will talk mainly about its technical aspects, interesting findings and noteworthy solutions, but will definitely throw in some random weirdness.

Wednesday, October 8, 2014

Leaving some time between the trip home from OOW14 and finishing up the blog post on the 4 official days of the event has had an interesting effect: excellent write-ups of the news and announcements have already popped up, so it's a pleasure to simply link to Mark Rittman's "News and Updates" post for all your needs in that regard.

Session or rather content-wise over these four days there are a couple of things to point out:

What I really appreciated was the fact that OakTableWorld - in contrast to OOW itself - sports a host of 10min TED talks over lunch. The TED talk format can be loved or hated but mostly it depends on the content and the speaker. Listening to Jonathan "Breaking Exadata" is huge fun and he doesn't need more than 10min to convince anyone that there's sales&marketing talk and then there's reality. Exadata's great, but no holy grail and you CAN break it.

Another real "WOW" effect was Eric Grancher from CERN ("those guys" with the Large Hadron Collider and the Higgs Boson ... maybe). Eric had a pretty neat TED talk about ASH to understand disk IO, but the killer was to see how they pipe that gathered information into Endeca to actually analzye their disk IOs through the Endeca engine. Very nice!

2.) Roadmap sessions

I sat in just about every roadmap session touching Business Analytics topics from the engineered systems over OBI 12c to the new Visual Analyzer and BI Mobile App Designer futures. Perfect place to catch up with the product managers and have some post-presentation chats with them. Looking forward to their upcoming initiatives and hopefully being an early adopter.

These sessions aren't as detailled - technically - as the ones you may see at KScope, but they're official, they're sanctioned, they aren't under NDA and they represent Oracles road into the future. If you plan on visiting OOW...pencil them in for the products you work with!

A special mention of the BI Apps roadmap session:
I was pretty surprised to see an almost total lack of reaction from the crowd when the slides reached the official declaration of the Informatica version of OBIA being discontinued and all OBIA projects having to move to ODI if they want to stay on the upgrade path. Maybe the message was too well hidden in marketing speech, but it should have been clear enough - so here it is again: there will be NO 11g release for BI Apps with Informatica and also none whatsoever in future versions. Informatica is out. OBIA customers will have to get onto the ODI train!

3.) Customer success stories

Not my thing. Tried sitting through one, but this is more for other end-clients to listen to and maybe get an idea or benchmarks.

All in all Oracle Openworld 2014 was an epic experience and I wouldn't have missed it for the world. If you're interested in another OOW-freshman's experience report, look no further than my good friend Robin Moffatt's write-up.

In terms of meeting people, tightening my community bonds with other Oracle ACEs, the OTN community and the superb ODTUG folks this event is definitely "up there" in the stratosphere called "that's just about as good as it gets"!